Editorial: Union strategies and worker engagement with new forms of work and employment

摘要

For the UK government, management and some trade union organisations, the idea behind the concept of the high-performance workplace (HPW) is that it can deliver comparative advantage because it enables firms to deliver increased performance on the basis of socially consensual management practices. There are two aspects to the broad picture of what is meant by socially consensual management practices. The concept of the HPW is not inherently about trade union participation in the organisation since it is concerned primarily with the relationship between company performance and a combination of determinate HRM variables (or 'bundles' of practices as some writers describe them). In this regard, it means typically that a consensus can be developed through a combination of internal organisational practices including team-working and other forms of task participation, skill development, employee appraisal and employee 'voice' mechanisms. However, it can also include the linking of these to an independent trade union commitment-where unions exist within the company-to other organisational goals, usually, though not always, mediated by partnership arrangements, whether formal or informal. The advantages are said to arise from the fact that the inter-relationship between the combined practices of the HPW (and noticeably in context of union agreement), leads inevitably to more intrinsically rewarding jobs, higher employee commitment and the mobilisation of greater discretionary effort from employees. Moreover, it is argued that since employee commitment can so easily be undermined by low-trust relations between workers and managers and antagonistic industrial relations, then an independent union working in partnership with management can 'protect' employees from the possibility of a top-down ('hard HRM') management agenda.